


Between the Minarets

by wizardslexicon



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-23
Updated: 2014-09-23
Packaged: 2018-02-18 11:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2346827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wizardslexicon/pseuds/wizardslexicon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which two humorously insincere human revolutionaries instrumental in the grassroots rebellion against a sexy alien fish empress and the antichrists Guy Fieri, Violent J, and Shaggy 2 Dope finally confront and do battle with the aforementioned aquatic monarch with junk in the trunk; contains one dragon, an omnipotent feline, physically improbable feats of athleticism, and no fewer than four fatal wounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between the Minarets

You turn to your brother, who is dressed to kill, as you are: he in his starched tuxedo, kinky-curly hair sweeping down to his neck, and you in your dress, with your severe, pin-straight do. You smile at that. _Dressed to kill_. You’re both varying shades of brown, but you’ve never looked or felt as close to being a corpse in a box as you do now.

You wait on a rooftop in Manhattan, now, for the Scourge of Seven Seas, the Empress of the Deep, Her Imperious Condescension. You’ve tracked her all the way here, scraped up the last vestiges of the revolution and brought it to bear on her forces. This is the last chance humanity has, and you already know you and Dave are going to make a mess of it. You just want to go down with a bang, not a whimper.

“I wonder what’s _kelp_ ing her,” you say to Dave, and despite his grimace of contemplation, he cracks a smile. He’s beautiful, all insincerity patched slapdash over a heart as strong as time. You can see the way he dies if you focus, so you don’t.

“Pro _bubble_ y a crisis of epic _porpoise_ tions,” he replies. “We got all the time in the world, though. We’re doing this, man. We’re making this...”

“ _Snappen_ ,” you say, and he finally cracks up, laughing those deep Jamaican-uncle belly laughs that almost knock his shades off.

That is when the dragon swoops down from a passing cloud.

It’s almost worth it to see Dave try to stop laughing enough to respect the entrance of the greatest despot humanity has ever known, too alien to be the fourth antichrist but too evil to be anything but Sea Hitler. He doesn’t manage it, though, and when the (bizarrely sexy, you wish you had known this before, a porn parody would have made _fantastic_  propaganda) Empress leaps off the dragon back, holding herself up with a barely visible white field, she doesn’t look happy with him.

“Glub damn, D. Stride,” she says, talking like a hoodlum in all her gold-glittering, wetsuited glory. “Clam your titties, fuck buoy, ‘fore I clam ‘em for ya.” Her 2x3dent appears in her hand, flashing sixteen malevolent colors that spread up her arm. This _is_ a duel, after all: she grabs the top half of Lady Liberty and has it float behind her, while some sort of cat curls in midair at her feet. You resist the urge to draw your needles and instead adjust your headband carefully.

“Dear brother, it seems that the Empress does not appreciate your sense of humor. Them’s fighting words, as they say.” You wonder why you are pretending that genocide is not the reason you stand here. You suppose it would feel uncomfortable to go full Julius Caesar to a woman who still thinks “shella dope” is a cool thing to say.

“Sha _reef_ don’t like it,” says Dave, drawing a surprisingly unshitty katana from his sylladex. “Rock the motherfuckin’ casbah.” And then, as they say, it is on.

She doesn’t even bother to come for you, first: the classic condescension at work. Instead, the dragon angles down, banks, and comes in breathing fire from the sides and if you didn’t know better you would think she was _controlling_ it—

Alien psychic powers. Of course.

Dave is already in motion, and there’s an arc of bright teal blood as his sword carves through dragon scales to find vulnerable flesh beneath. The dragon is gifted with sight that burns as its breath does: you manage to fling a rope of yarn around the dragon’s front claw just before the rooftop beneath you explodes, and you start to climb your way up.

Dave’s grabbed on to the dragon, and he makes it to the front shoulder about when you do, stabbing as he goes. But you have a better idea. You take the entire neck in a single bound as the dragon begins to slow, and then you shove your needles deep into its brain, pull out a taser, and electrify them.

 _God bless electrochemical impulse firing_ , you think, as the dragon barrels full speed toward the Condesce. Psychic powers control body through the brain, and you just disrupted her link. The victory is short-lived, though: she hurls Lady Liberty at you, and you have just enough time to consider the ironies of freedom fighters killed by the Statue of Liberty before the dragon’s eyes blow the statue up and shards of copper are flying past you at approximately “fuck this” miles per hour.

Dave goes up: he’s the expert on midair combat, can go for ten minutes in free fall with no support, and he jumps from piece to piece, only to find that they’re being held in place, and the Condesce has made herself a makeshift staircase of exploding copper to walk dramatically down, waving her hips from side to side. You decide that her mix of sex appeal and sharktooth brutality should be called _lascivicious_ , and Dave’s sword meets her trident. She expected him to hold the block, but she fights like a troll, not a Strider, and he’s behind her in an instant, going for the beheading.

He takes her head off in one clean slash...and it’s pulled back to its body by threads of that sixteen-flashing light as she kicks his shit in. You can see the look on his face: shock, pain, and a surprise so comical you almost laugh, hollowed out and empty. He’s falling, falling: a crackle of sharp green energy, and she’s floating over him, snatching away his sword, snapping it in half between two fingers, and burying what’s left in his chest. You can hear the wet _thud_ of it from where you stand, and his scream. _Fatality._

You knew this was coming, but the scream that tears itself out of your throat does not seem to acknowledge that fact, and when you raise one hand, a bolt of black lightning comes from the tip of your needle, seemingly magic, but better. Much better. It tears a hole right through her chest cavity, and the look on her face isn’t fear, oh no, it’s _curiosity,_ and that’s when you know you’re dead. The hole flashes, fills itself in, and you’ll swear to the Noble Circle you saw an eight-ball when she vanished and three centers of pain appeared in your ribs.

Her hand pushes you off the prongs of the trident, tearing on exit, and you feel blood and water pouring from the wound even as she tosses you onto the building where Dave bleeds out his last. One final mercy, you suppose. His breath bubbles out from between his lips, tortured and rattling and slow, and he says,

“But it turns out to be CRAZY what kinda stabs this bitch has...” You chuckle with what breath you can find.

“I’m...telling you, skill like that is unreal, it doesn’t even happen,” you reply, making your voice as conksuck as possible. The Condesce floats away in red and blue slo-mo—or maybe that’s your deoxygenated brain making the world fade to black? She’s the last thing you see, and like a final hurrah, the last thing you hear from the blackness:

“The world...is on fire.”

 

 


End file.
